Political Economy of the Nice Treaty: Rebalancing the EU Council
When it was established in the 1950's, the European Community was based on a global balance of power among member States. That initial vision of the founding fathers of the European Union has been embodied in the weighted voting system of the EU Council. Since its origin, this voting system has remained largely unchanged, despite several enlargements. The scale of the member States' relative voting weights in the EU-6 of 1957 is about the same as that of the EU-15 of 2000. For several decades, voting rights of the large member States (France, Germany, Italy, and the United-Kingdom) have been 5 times higher than that of Luxembourg, the smallest member. When enlargement occurred, new member States were granted weighted votes according to their relative sizes, without any modification to the existing system or to the relative voting rights of the other members. Only once, was the initial voting system adapted because of enlargement, in 1973. However, even in that case, the same balance of power was essentially maintained. The adaptation of the voting system was nominal in nature. This nominal increase of all voting rights of member States was designed to allow better differentiation among medium-size countries (e.g. between Belgium and Ireland) otherwise impossible.

The Future of European Agricultural Policies
The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union (the European Economic Community at the time when it came into being) is a never-ending subject. On the one hand it was a driving force in the process of integration - although this role is often over-estimated – on the other hand it was a permanent source of conflict that sometimes brought the Community at the edge of collapse. In an area as densely regulated as agriculture, conflicts of national interests are quite natural. Underlying subjects were the level of protection and the way in which protection takes place, both affecting the agricultural sectors of Member States in a different way, production quotas, common subsidies, national subsidies etc. A major source of conflict that unduly dominated the debate during the 1970s and the 1980 was the system of Monetary Compensatory Amounts, strongly defended by Germany and attacked by others. A permanent issue for Germany is the distribution of financial resources brought about by the CAP in which Germany has the position of a net payer.